Web page indexing is one of the first steps (after crawling) in a complex process that allows search engines to understand what web pages are about so they can rank and serve them as search results.
Search engines are constantly improving the way they crawl and index websites.
Understanding how Google, Seznam, Bing, and other search engines approach crawling and indexing websites is essential to technical search engine optimization (SEO) and useful in creating strategies to improve search visibility.
How search engines work today
Let’s look at the basic principles of how search engines work. This article focuses on indexing . So let’s dive into the issue.
Why you can’t do without indexing
Website indexing is a key process for its visibility in search engines. Why is this so?
Search engines need to know your content: Indexing allows search engines to crawl your website and learn about its structure, content, and keywords. Without indexing, search engines wouldn’t have access to your content and wouldn’t be able to display your website in search results.
Improves visibility in search engines:
Indexing is the first step to getting your website to appear in search results. When your website is successfully indexed, search engines can include your content in their databases and display it to users in relevant search results.
Content Updates and Syncs: Regular website indexing is essential to keep your content up to date in search engines. When you make changes to your website or add new content, search engines capture these updates through indexing and update their databases, allowing users to find the most up-to-date information.
Keyword targeting:
Indexing is important for your website to rank well in relevant keyword-based search results. Search engines analyze the keywords on your website during indexing and use them to determine the relevance of your website to user queries.
Get feedback from search engines: During indexing, search engines can provide feedback about technical issues on your site, such as incorrect URL structure, inaccessible pages, or missing meta descriptions. This feedback allows you to improve the technical quality of your site and optimize it for better search engine results.
Website indexing
Indexing is where the ranking process begins after crawling a website. Indexing basically means adding the content of a website to Google’s system so that it can be considered for ranking. It is an essential part of SEO . When you create a new page on the website, there are several ways to index it.
The easiest way to get a page indexed is to do nothing at all.
Google has crawlers that follow links, so assuming the new content is linked from a page that is already in the index, Google will eventually discover it and add it to its index. More on that later.
How to achieve faster page indexing
But what if you want Google’s bot to reach your page faster?
This can be important if you have up-to-date content or if you’ve made an important change to the page that you need Google to know about.
I use faster methods when, for example, I’ve just optimized a critical page or edited the title and description to improve click-throughs.
I want to know when specifically they were captured and displayed in the SERP so I know where to start measuring improvement.
You can use several other methods.
XML sitemaps are the oldest and generally most reliable way to notify search engines about your content. An XML sitemap provides search engines with a list of all the pages on your website, as well as additional details about them, such as when they were last modified.
You can submit your sitemap to Bing via Bing Webmaster Tools and you can also submit it to Google via Search Console . We highly recommend it – it will speed up indexing of your site significantly!
However, if you need to index a page immediately, this is not particularly reliable.
2. Request indexing using Google Search Console
You start by clicking on the top search box, which by default reads: “Check any URL in the source…”.
Enter the URL you want to index and press Enter.
If the Google page is already known, you will be presented with a lot of information. We won’t go into that here, but I recommend logging in and seeing what’s there if you haven’t already.
For our purposes, the important “ Request Indexing ” button will appear here . The button will appear regardless of whether the page has been indexed or not.
Within seconds to minutes, you can search Google for the new content or URL and find the change or new content.
3. Join Bing’s IndexNow service
Bing has an open protocol based on a push method of notifying search engines of new or updated content.
An example of a pull protocol is the old-fashioned XML sitemap .
Which relies on a search engine deciding to visit and index it (or on a search engine fetching it using Search Console).